e of his adversary.
Concerning this last game, I remember the following terms: "ebs," which,
seasonably vociferated, that is, when it is the speaker's turn to play
and before his adversary can say anything, serves as an incantation
authorizing the speaker to deliver his fire from any point other than
that where his marble lies, equally distant from the objective point;
"clearings," in like manner, authorizing the preparation of a reasonably
unobstructed line of fire; and "fen ebs," "fen clearings," and "fen
everythings," to be pronounced before the other player speaks, and
which, by virtue of the prohibitory syllable "fen" (_defendre_, Fr.),
prevent respectively ebs, clearings, and everything,--that is to say,
any elusion or amelioration of the existing conditions of fire.

In games of ball, to confess the truth, I was but feeble. Scarce,
indeed, was I of average skill in any of them except the simplest
two,--"bung-ends," and "one old cat." In the first of these, one boy
throws the ball against the side of a house, or other perpendicular
unelastic plane, while the other smites it with his club at the rebound.
In the second, played as a trio, boy A throws the ball at boy B,
standing opposite, whose duty is to smite, while boy C, behind B,
catches B out in case of a miss.

I was pretty good at "tag" and "catch," games of running and dodging. In
these, one boy is called "it," i. e. leader, or victim. He pursues the
rest; and the games are alike, except that in "catch" he who is to be
made "it" must be caught and held by him who is "it," whereas in "tag" a
touch is sufficient to transfer the responsibility, and inaugurate the
new choragus.

There. Such quaint scraps are all that is left me of my existence as a
little child. I know men who say, that, within their own consciousness
and memories, they have the witness and knowledge of a life even before
that of this humanity. But, for my own part, I should never know, by
anything in my own memory, that I had been a baby,--that I was or did
anything before that first school where the ferocious little girl was
handcuffed in unbleached-cotton bags, for scratching.

"The child is father of the man," saith the great poet of dry
sentimentalizing. Therefore the man's endeavor to remember about his
childhood might reasonably be expected to bring him into _limbo patrum_.
But it is a dim and narrow field to grope in. It is not wandering in a
darkened world,--it is feeling in a dark